Sports Interactive has announced that Football Manager 2021 is still coming this year, but will do so later than planned.
Fans have been wondering about the whereabouts of Football Manager 2021 as word on it has been quiet. Studio director Miles Jacobson released a statement today to quell fans’ fears on what that silence could mean, saying the game is still coming but will come out “a little later than we’d originally planned.” Given the last five mainline Football Manager games have arrived in early November, it seems likely that this was the planned release window for this year’s entry.
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“What I can confirm today is that, despite all the problems going on in the world, there will be new Football Manager games released later this year,” Jacobson said in a blog post. “They will be delivered a little later than we’d originally planned, but they’ll have exceptionally strong feature sets…albeit different to those we thought we’d settled on back in January when I completed my ‘dream feature set.'”
Jacobson didn’t expand on what that dream feature set would have been, nor what features have made it into the final version.
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Sports Interactive says it’s taken a monumental effort to make Football Manager 2021’s release possible this year and has required a lot of flexibility from the team. The game has changed scope on an almost “weekly basis” scaling both upward and downward, but Jacobson says it believes fans will appreciate all of the improvements and new features in this year’s game.
“Our games will be on more platforms and available on more stores than ever before when they’re released later this year but, with regards to features and release dates, it’s a little too early for us to talk about the specifics right now. Please cut us a little bit of slack and rest assured that we will once again deliver a set of games that provide hundreds of hours of entertainment and remain the best value for money on the market — and something to help you escape from the real world at the moment, at least for a while.”
While waiting for the latest iteration in the series, check out our thoughts on last year’s game in our Football Manager 2020 review.
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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.
Source: IGN.com Football Manager 2021 Is Still Coming This Year, But Later than Planned